Sorry, troll, I've been following this, and the Gore team didn't ask for **two** manual recounts -- they asked for one, and when the question of what should count or not came up, they said include the dimples. Even dragged one of our Massachusetts pols down to Florida to testify on our experience and this was way back in the first week after the election.

(The dimpled ballots would count in Texas, too, and wasn't it Dubya who signed a revision into Texas law that favors manual recounts over machine recounts, hmmm?)

But it wasn't two separate requests for counts, it was one request and one argument about what should be included in the count.

And it's not the machines I'm faulting, it's the METHOD of balloting. Illiteracy has only been grounds for disenfranchisement in this country for racist reasons, and that's why on other kinds of ballots, a person who puts a check mark instead of an X gets his/her vote counted anyway. The problem doesn't lie with the machines, it lies with HOW the cards get punched, possibly with the paper of the card itself, and with totally inadequate voter education.

As for Florida law enshrining the voter intent, I may have gotten a little fancy, but I have read that the law there says "intent to vote" and I seem to remember seeing (in the NYTimes)the text of the USSupreme Court decision which cited the Florida Constitution's bill of rights as putting "the right to vote" up at the top of the list. Sounds pretty enshrined to me...

The "what if" that strains my credulity is the argument that a voter would press hard enough to dimple the chad and then decide not to vote after all. I can rest a pencil on the paper without even leaving a mark, much less a dent, and that's on much softer paper than an IBM card!

If it calms you though, I also think that any absentee ballot received within the time limit, with a signature that matches the voters' and which doesn't represent a second vote (which is why some of them were invalidated) should be counted. Particularly if the voter can be shown to be in the armed forces.

I'm in favor of having the fewest possible number of votes discarded, regardless of who would win the election under those circumstances.